Author's Note

Before I was a mother I have always been a writer. I'm an essayist, a memoirist, a contributor to fifteen books in Native and Indigenous Studies, memoir and nonfiction, and the author of two memoirs, We Who Walk the Seven Ways, and Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German, my stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by my identity as a mixed-blood.

But I never planned to write about my journey though motherhood. It began with a single essay in 1984 after I adopted my son from Korea, and then editors began inviting me to write essays and feature articles, and my readership grew. 

 

I'm well into grandmotherhood now, and I'm leaving a trail of my motherhood footprints behind. 

When I began assembling a collection of my essays to include here, I found that each one begged for revision. A number of my feature articles were too magazine-y in tone and needed to be reshaped into essay. 

Other pieces, when further examined with my poet’s eye, had become too pretentious and gave off the full-bodied notion that as a mother I had things all figured out, which of course I don’t. 

 

I also contemplated my gloomy stories. Although I'm often remembered for difficulties I've faced, I want it to go down in history that there has also been great joy within my journey through motherhood. Today as a mother and grandmother my life in no way resembles what I had hoped for, or expected it to be, and yet I am deeply thankful for where this journey has led me. I also enjoy seeing how my perspective has evolved and changed over the past five decades. 

 

Thank you to the editors where these essays were first published.

Photo by Lawrence K. Ho